General News

Physics Alumnus, Dr. Byron K. Freelon (Ph.D. 2001) recently received the first Morehouse Physics Prize. Freelon accepted the award and delivered a colloquium on high-temperature superconductors at Morehouse College on April 5th.

The National Society of Black Physicists established the award "to honor graduates from Historical Black Colleges and Universities who have shown considerable promise as physics researchers and teachers." Freelon is currently a scientist at University of California-Berkeley.

Dr. Freelon attended Prairie View A&M University and received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Minnesota in 2001. After graduate school, he worked as a post-doctoral research associate with Dr. Zahid Hussain at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. There he developed a beamline-based molecular beam epitaxy system at the Advanced Light Source (ALS). He is presently a research scientist in the group of UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. Freelon is interested in various synchrotron techniques to study high-temperature superconductors and soft-matter systems. In addition to synchrotron techniques he is working on inelastic neutron scattering with Professor Birgeneau. Dr. Freelon is also leading an international collaboration to develop a pulsed-laser deposition facility at the Advanced Light Source synchrotron.